White Horse (21 page)

We walk until night comes and Athens plunges into darkness. Save for a dot of light up ahead. I describe the scene for Lisa.

“Let’s check it out,” I say.

“I don’t want to go.”

“We’ll sneak up and I’ll see if it’s okay.”

“No.” Hysterical.

“I’ll go alone, then.”

“No, don’t. Stay.”

“Okay. I’ll stay.”

We move closer, because that’s the way the road goes. The dot spreads; we are bugs drawn to its welcoming glow. Lisa tenses until I am walking alongside a violin bow.

Ahead
is an optical illusion. The light emanates from a wooded area near enough that I could spit and hit it. It’s to our right and down, down, down.

“We can stay low; I’ll look over the edge.” I nod at the highway’s lip. “We don’t have to get any closer.”

“We’re not going down?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

We do that. We go to the edge, stay low. Only my eyes peek over the solid gray line. What I’m looking at used to be a playground and park. Now it’s growing wild, with nature reasserting its dominance all over the equipment bolted into the ground where children once played. The swings are covered in a tangle of greenery that does not care that steel can’t choke. A waterfall of vine pours down the slide. And in the middle a fire blazes inside a metal trash can wrenched from its original place against the water fountain.

“I can hear fire,” Lisa whispers. “Are there people?”

Sure enough, I hear the crackle, snap, pop of fire eating.

“I don’t know.” We wait for a while but no one comes. Tired of speculating, I steer Lisa along our original path. She seems okay. Exhausted. But I am, too.

Not more than a few dozen feet have passed when I turn and glance over my shoulder. The light is gone.

DATE: THEN

Slightly south of nowhere it’s
raining cats. They fall from the trees like ripe apples. While people put recreation on hold, the forests filled with all the felines who heard the call of the wild and answered.

It’s a couple who’ve “gone bush” in Australia that solve the mystery of the missing cats. They tell it to a reporter over fish and chips and Carlton Draught.

“We got tired of the government telling us to stay home. Home’s where everyone’s dying. So we packed up all our gear and went into the rain forest. Nobody’s sick out there, aye? Anyway, we get to the middle of the fuckin’ bush and what do we see?”

There’s a pause while the reporter coughs.

“Go on, guess. Bet you can’t. It’s all those cats. Thousands of the buggers. Must have been imitating koalas, aye?”

“Were they all dead?”

“Yep. The lot of ’em.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“We figured if the disease went that far, we’d rather die holding a cold beer.”

Reports of the same soon
trickle in from the Americas and Europe: dead cats perched in trees until storms shake them from the branches, until gravity pulls them back to the earth. They’ve died from starvation—waiting and watching for reasons unknown.

I think they were hiding from
us
.

I’m on the train again
when Jesse marches up to me, a marionette man in a puffy coat.

“I’m not going to ask if I can sit down because we already know each other and if we were friends you’d ask first. Friends ask friends to sit down. That’s good manners.”

“Have a seat.”

He sits. Same as before. Hands splayed on his thighs, eyes ahead.

“I know you can’t talk to me. My mother explained that to me when I called her. She said you could get into very big trouble and maybe lose your job. ‘Don’t mess with someone’s livelihood’ is what she said, ‘because maybe that woman’s got mouths to feed.’ So I want to give you my business card. Would that be okay?”

“Sure.”

He exhales sharply like he was worried about my answer.

“Okay. I’m going to have to write it out because I haven’t got any printed yet.” His coat whispers and squeaks as he shoves a hand into his pocket and pulls out a sparkly purple pen and note card cut into four equal pieces. On the top piece he writes his name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. “That’s just in case the Internet starts working again. ‘Be hopeful,’ my mom says.” He gives me the card, stashes the rest back in his pocket.

He waits until I’ve slipped the makeshift business card into my purse.

“Do you like cooking?”

“Sure.”

“I like to cook. Last night I made mini pizzas on muffins. I hardly burned them at all.” For the rest of the ride he talks food. I listen and make all the right noises. Because I know what he doesn’t: I’m going to tell him everything. But not here. And when the train ride ends, I tell him so.

THIRTEEN

DATE: NOW

I
have to stay awake. I can’t rest. Not if it means closing my eyes. We’re in a department store. Lisa’s lying on a dais that once held dummies dressed in next season’s fashions. I’m on the floor beside her, legs crossed, elbows pressed into my knees. A band tightens around my head, and as it does, my neck grows weaker and weaker. I have to use my hands just to keep my head from sagging onto my chest.

She’s bleeding. It started during the night: at first a crimson smear, then a slow drip. Now it’s painting a Picasso inside her thighs.

Death waits, but I’m not ready to let it take her.
Fuck you
, I scream inside my head, because saying it aloud would scare her. She’s the color of blood-drained chicken. Exsanguination, they call it, death by blood loss. I don’t even know how to go about replacing what she’s lost—not in this world.

Lisa knows I’m watching her.

“Don’t worry so much, Zoe. I’m okay.”

She’s not okay. What she is doesn’t even have any of the same letters as
okay
. She’s bleeding still. At the very least I need to get to a drugstore, find some pads, diapers, antibiotics, anything, but I can’t go
without her and I can’t take her with me. I wish the Swiss was still here. I’m glad he’s not. I wish my mother was here, or Jenny, or Nick. I want Nick here. He’d know the right thing to do. She’d be safe with him until I returned with supplies.

“I’m okay,” Lisa repeats. Her words slur together. “Let’s both sleep. Tell me about the place we’re going first.”

“We’re going north to a village called Agria. It’s by the water in a gulf.”

“They play golf?”

“You don’t know what a gulf is?”

“Uh-uh.”

Somewhere between yearning for sleep and berating myself for needing rest, it happens.

I dream of Sam. He’s in a car, the one he died in, his body mangled beyond repair. Blood bubbles between his lips. His mother is there, too, filing her nails.

You can’t save everyone
, Sam tells me.

She can try
, his mother says.

They argue back and forth while I listen to the steady drip. Gasoline, probably. Maybe blood. After a while I get tired of their banter.

How will I get my Girl Scout badge if I don’t save them all?
I ask.

Neither of them has an answer. My former mother-in-law sets her file on the dash, closes her eyes, and quits breathing, just like she’s too stubborn to do anything else but die.

Sam looks at me, smiles a crimson smile.

I would have fallen in love with you
, I say.
In time
.

Stop collecting badges
, he tells me.
They don’t matter in the end
.

Then I wake up and Sam and his mother are gone, and so is Lisa. Only, this time she’s left me a trail. Little red blood droplets lead down the sidewalk, a morbid trail of bread crumbs. They’re a bold and royal red. Fresh.

I follow the trail, try to remember the story of Hansel and Gretel. The birds ate their bread crumbs while the lost and hungry children consumed their fill of the gingerbread house in the woods. But the house was just a ploy, a lure for children who couldn’t resist candy. Witches, the Brothers Grimm told us, liked nothing more than a good leg o’ child
for supper. She took Hansel and Gretel captive, then plumped them for the eating. Her reward was a fiery end after being stuffed into her own oven by a gutsy Gretel.

What is Lisa’s gingerbread house? If I find that, I will find her.

The next few drops are smears. I try to think what that means, but my mind is both sleep hazy and scared sharp. I leapfrog conclusions, toss away hypotheses, form new ones that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with conspiracy theories.

I’m running now, following the crumbs. I need to know where they go. I need to find her. Because I don’t think she’s alone. She can’t be—not without someone to tempt and guide her.

Over and over, I hurl the lash at myself. This is my fault. I fell asleep when I knew I couldn’t afford to. I knew she was hurt, her mind clouded.

This is my fault for walking away from her when she was my responsibility.

Blood. Blood. More blood. All the way up the street, past abandoned tavernas, past shops with no clientele. Some wear shattered windows and battered doors, but most remain untouched, as though humanity just up and walked away from life.

The landscape changes. Retail starts a gentle shift toward car yards hawking vehicles old and new. Most are gone. The rest are scrap metal. Others have tried to take a car, get the hell out of here, and failed. A skeleton hangs from a steering wheel, his or her arm snared by the driver who has rolled the window up to form a fatal trap. The driver is there, too, only sloppier. The other guy has had his body picked clean by predatory birds and overzealous bugs. The driver is a meat sack dressed in rotting rags.

I can’t care about them right now.

Lisa’s blood trail leads me to a squat building with windows made of wire-threaded glass blocks. The sign on the door is all Greek to me. Ha-ha. I can’t even laugh at my own joke. I wind up being sarcastic to myself, a sign that I’m on my way to crazy or already there.

The blood leads here, to this beige building with Greek letters and business hours from 9:00 a.m till 5:00 p.m. on some days of the week that don’t matter. I don’t even know what day this is; they’ve blurred
since leaving Brindisi. That was the only date that mattered, and it’s gone.

The smell hits me the moment I lean against the door with my shoulder. It makes a
pah
sound, like an old, wealthy man sucking a cigar in a casino, holding, holding, then exhaling into the face of his date—the one he bought for too much money, yet doesn’t value. A lungful of institutional air is what I get. Pine that’s never seen a forest, or a cone, mixed with the cat-pee stench of ammonia. It almost, but not quite, covers the bright copper of fresh blood.

My heart clacks on my ribs.
Get the hell outta here
, it taps in Morse code. But this is like one of those dreams, we’ve all had them, where the Big Bad Wolf is coming right for us but we can’t move for love or bags stuffed full of money.

Clack, clack
.

Chairs. Plastic molded chairs, the kind they have at the DMV. They’re set up in a square horseshoe surrounding a table. The laminate is snapping off at the edges so the cheap board underneath peeks through. There’s a counter with frosted glass panels that slide on ball bearings. There’s a bare spot on the wall where a television used to hang.

I want to laugh, because when disaster strikes, people always prioritize by racing for the electronics.
Take that, Joneses
, they seem to say.
We’re just as good now
. Which is all well and good, except the Joneses are probably lying in a gutter facedown, rotting. They don’t care about television or toasters that cook eggs and bacon at the same time as their bread. Death is the great demotivator.

Clack, clack
.

My feet won’t work. They wriggle inside my boots, ignoring the flurry of messages from my brain.

Clack, clack
.

This place, I know it. I don’t want to admit it, but I know. There’s only one kind of place that smells the same the whole world over. It’s like they all get their cleaner from one central warehouse. I know it. I worked with it. The smell is as familiar to me as chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven or Nick’s sunshiny skin when I’d breathe him in as deep as I could take him.

This is a clinic. A medical facility of some flavor. The furnishings give
nothing away; the paintings are generic prints of scenery: flower-filled fields, a grazing cow. The Virgin Mary stares down from one wall, also silent as she balances her babe on one knee.

Lisa’s blood is here, too, smeared across the floor. A monochrome rainbow stretching down the hall.

Pine and blood. Copper and autumn.

Clack, clack
.

My legs move like they’re new. The joints grind and squeak beneath my skin. But then I realize, no, that noise isn’t me, it’s coming from the other end of the Lisa rainbow, the one that’s hidden around a corner at the end of a hall. It’s the sound of cutlery rattling around a stainless steel sink.

Clack, clack
.

Someone thought it was funny to run a line of yellow tiles down the hallway. Lions and tigers and bears— oh my! I follow them, because that’s what lost girls do when they want to find the wizard and get the hell home.

Down the hall. Turn right. Follow the yellow tile that’s orange in places where Lisa’s blood overlaps. A door that isn’t closed, just pushed until a narrow crack of the world beyond is visible. I nudge it with my knee until it swings wide.

Clack, clack, pow
.

Lisa is there. At least, I think it’s her. There’s so much blood, I can’t tell what’s what. She’s on the examining table, legs in stirrups, arms flaccid and dangling off the sides. Her head lolls toward me but she does not know I’m here. She won’t know anything again except maybe Hades or God or whichever deity she prayed was real.

Between her legs is another figure, also doused in blood. His clothes are soaked, his blond hair smeared and flecked, all of it a bold and vivid red. Which strikes me as weird, because Lisa is dead and yet her blood still looks like it should be in a living body.